api-design
Customers do not just want webhooks to be delivered. They want to prove to themselves and to their auditors that the webhooks were delivered and processed. The delivery receipt is the load-bearing object that makes the audit story work.
api-design
Most APIs make it easy to get data in and harder to get data out. The pattern is short-sighted: customers who feel locked in are less willing to commit, and customers who eventually leave do so with worse outcomes for everyone. A well-designed migration endpoint surface is one of the underappre
api-design
Idempotency keys solve the single-request retry problem. They do not solve the multi-request workflow problem where the customer needs to inspect a resource, make a decision, and then mutate it without another caller intervening between the steps. Resource locks are the API primitive for that p
api-design
Bulk API operations on millions of rows need different patterns than the small-batch endpoints most APIs ship. Cursor-based bulk operations let customers process unbounded result sets through repeatable, resumable, idempotent batches without timing out or losing track of progress.
api-design
When a customer's webhook receiver has been broken for a day, the replay API needs to deliver thousands of events without overwhelming the receiver or burning through your delivery budget. Bulk replay is a separate primitive from per-event replay, and the patterns that work depend on the receiv
api-design
Pagination cursors are tokens that customers eventually misuse. Setting the right TTL is the difference between bounded server-side state and a cursor that holds open a database snapshot for a week.
api-design
Read replicas help scale read-heavy APIs, but they only help if the application knows which queries can tolerate lag and which cannot. The routing logic determines whether replicas are an asset or a liability.
api-design
Service limits are different from rate limits and quotas. They are absolute system boundaries that exist for architectural or safety reasons, not for billing. Most APIs document them poorly, which produces predictable customer surprise.
api-design
CORS is the browser policy that controls which origins can call your API from JavaScript. Get it wrong in the permissive direction and you create CSRF vulnerabilities; get it wrong in the restrictive direction and customers cannot integrate from browsers at all.
api-design
Customers integrating with your webhooks need to test their receiver before production traffic arrives. A test-endpoint API surface that lets them trigger arbitrary events on demand turns webhook integration from a guessing game into a verifiable workflow.
api-design
Customer impersonation is the highest-trust feature in your admin tool: it lets support staff see exactly what a customer sees. It is also the easiest backdoor to build accidentally, and a small set of patterns separates the safe implementations from the dangerous ones.
api-design
Most APIs ship with a handful of documented error codes and a long tail of undocumented ones returned in practice. The teams whose customers integrate fastest are the teams whose error code catalog matches what the API actually returns.